I had written that I've begun using crypto faucet websites to try getting STEEM to grow my SP, and that I'd post more details if the experiment were to go well.
I began the experiment on Friday, July 12th, 2019. I had estimated to be able to gather 0.3 STEEM in a week, but the results were better than I had expected. In only three days (Friday, Saturday and Sunday), I managed to collect 0.00072020 Dash, traded for 0.335 STEEM and sent to my account through BlockTrades. If I manage to keep at this pace, it might be possible to make around 0.7 STEEM in a week. Ideally, I'd like to be able to make 1 STEEM a week, but I don't think this will be possible unless I find a way to increase the overall earnings a bit. As it's only my first week doing this, I'm still learning how those faucets work, and trying to optimize the process so that I can get the most out of them. I hope to find a way to increase my earnings along the way.
So, below are the details in case anyone wants to do the same as me.
A Brief Word on Faucets
Image source: Pixabay
Faucets are websites that earn money through ads and share their earnings with visitors, in the form of very small cryptocurrency payments. To use them, visitors have to solve a captcha on a page full of ads. Faucets are a way to distribute cryptocurrencies to interested users, and are more suited to spread the word about new cryptos that aren't worth much yet, though many faucets that pay in already established cryptos like Bitcoin still exist. Since the payments are very small, we shouldn't expect to make huge amounts of money using faucets (unless they pay in some crypto that happens to have an explosive growth later on like what happened to Bitcoin, but let's not count on that :P ). But as small users on the STEEM platform, we're already used to only making a few cents, so every extra cent counts (to me, at least).
The Faucets I'm Using
So far, I'm using faucets that send the payments to a website called CoinPot, from where we can withdraw the cryptos to a wallet (in my case, the wallet address provided by BlockTrades to convert the crypto and send it over to my STEEM account).
Note: it's advisable that you create a new profile on your browser just for using faucets, separate from the main profile that you use for your everyday browsing.
Before registering at the faucets, first you must register at CoinPot. They only ask for an email address and a password, and then you have to tick the box to agree to their terms of service, and solve a captcha (thankfully there's also an audio captcha option for visually impaired users like me). Lastly, you'll get a confirmation email and will have to click a link to activate your account.
After that, you can register at the faucets (some of them only ask for the email address you used on CoinPot, while others have a registration process identical to CoinPot's). Below are the ones I'm using:
Note: the faucet links are referral links.
BitFun
BitFun pays in Bitcoin, or rather, in satoshi (the smallest fractions of Bitcoin). You can claim the coins every 3 minutes, but the amount of coins will slowly increase if you wait more. Aside from the faucet, it's also possible to earn satoshi by playing Flash and HTML5 games in your browser.
There is also a dice game where it's possible to multiply the earnings, but also to lose. I prefer not to risk losing my precious little satoshi :P .
Bonus Bitcoin
Bonus Bitcoin also pays in Bitcoin (satoshi). You can claim the coins every 15 minutes (different from the previous website, the coins don't add up with time). At every midnight (UTC time), they will credit some satoshi to your account, as a 5% bonus based on how much you earned from the faucet in a period of 72 hours. For example, if you managed to win 200 satoshi from the faucet in the last 72 hours (three days), the next day they'll pay you 10 satoshi (5% of 200). So, the more you use the faucet, the bigger the bonus will be!
The page tells how much each claim is on average (at the moment I write this, the average is 6 satoshi). The default is to have the claims be random amounts up to 5,000 satoshi, but of course one needs too much luck to get all that! In my experience, the claims are usually 2 or 3 satoshi (so far, it has always been below the stated average). But there's a way to improve this. If you click on "Change your claim settings" and tick the "Always receive the average claim amount" option, you'll always receive the average amount but will lose the chance to randomly claim higher amounts like 5,000 satoshi. I usually use this option as I'm not counting on this random chance anyway. I'd rather guarantee 6 satoshi every time rather than keep getting only 2 or 3.
Bonus Bitcoin also has a dice game where it's possible to multiply the earnings, but also to lose. Again, I prefer not to take risks...
The Moon Faucets
Then, there are the faucets whose names start with "Moon." All of them work exactly the same way, and the only thing that changes is the cryptocurrency they pay. They are: Moon Bitcoin, Moon Litecoin, Moon Cash (Bitcoin Cash), Moon Dash, and Moon Dogecoin.
The way they work is, you can claim coins every 5 minutes, but if you don't, the coins build up with time. They give a 1% bonus on all your claims for each consecutive day you use the faucet. So, in theory, if you were to claim at least once per day for 100 consecutive days, you'd get a 100% bonus on your claims and double the earnings... but if you miss one day, you lose the bonus and have to start from 0% again.
Edit (2020/06/10): out of these "Moon" sites, I previously had problems accessing Moon Bitcoin, Litecoin and Dogecoin, as the pages were very heavy and slow to load on my machine. But after the three websites were remade in the beginning of June 2020, they became as fast as the others and now I can use them normally.
CoinPot Tips
All the earnings from the above faucets are instantly sent to CoinPot, where they get consolidated. CoinPot is a cryptocurrency micro wallet. It supports Bitcoin, Litecoin, Bitcoin Cash, Dash, Dogecoin and CoinPot Tokens (their own token), and can convert between all of them with no additional fees. One cool thing is that, every time you make a claim at any of the above faucets, you get 3 CoinPot tokens (at the moment of this writing, each one is worth around 1 satoshi) and you can convert them to any of the other mentioned cryptos too! This means that you may choose to leave the coins building up at BitFun and the Moon faucets and just claim a few times per day, or claim often to stack up on the CoinPot Tokens so that you have more coins to convert.
I convert everything to Dash, which at the moment of this writing has the lowest minimum withdrawal value among all the options. While CoinPot's minimum withdrawal amount for Bitcoin is 10,000 satoshi, the minimum amount for Dash is only 0.0002 Dash, which is a bit more than 200 satoshi, not hard to reach at all (I can usually reach that in one day).
I've been using BitFun, Bonus Bitcoin, and two of the Moon sites. I claim from each faucet website at least ten times per day. I claim more times whenever I can, but let's assume ten claims per day for each site as an example. If the claim average for Bonus Bitcoin is 6 satoshi (like at the moment of this writing) and I wait to claim when at least 5 satoshi have built up on BitFun, each of my 10 daily claims would get me 5 satoshi from BitFun, 6 from Bonus Bitcoin and other coins from the two of the Moon sites. This will get me at least 110 satoshi and 120 CoinPot Tokens, not even counting the other cryptos. If I were to convert the CoinPot Tokens to Bitcoin and add them to the other satoshi, the total would be already more than 200 satoshi. This is close to the minimum Dash withdrawal amount, in just one day. I plan to withdraw everything at once only at the end of the week, though. But the quicker I build up those Dash, the better!
At the end of the day, I convert everything to Dash. The plan is to trade the Dash for STEEM through BlockTrades every weekend. In my first test with three days of claims (mentioned at the beginning of the post), I withdrew the Dash to the BlockTrades' wallet at the end of Sunday night, and when I turned the computer on in the morning on Monday, the STEEM was already in my account. Here is the link showing the transaction on Steemd.
Other Things to do at CoinPot
There are a few other "attractions" at the CoinPot site, like:
- One of those dice games, only you bet CoinPot Tokens instead of satoshi.
- A lottery that runs every hour and you buy a ticket using CoinPot Tokens, and the prize is a huge amount of... CoinPot Tokens.
- And challenges where you gain stars for reaching daily, monthly or all-time goals, like doing a certain number of faucet claims or buying a certain number of lottery tickets. The 25 users who manage to get the most stars in the month get prizes. All prizes (both for reaching goals and for being on the top 25 of the month) are also in CoinPot Tokens.
The "easiest" challenge that can be completed every day, though not exactly that easy, would be to reach 100 faucet claims in a day. The reward for reaching this goal is 100 CoinPot Tokens, in addition to the 300 gotten from using the faucets and the claimed coins. This is something I'm still thinking about as a way to increase my earnings... it's obviously time-consuming, but I'll see about organizing my schedule to try to do this once in a while.
Closing Words
This is it for the CoinPot faucets. My experiment is going well so far, and I might begin trying out non CoinPot faucets as well. If I find other interesting faucets or other tips, I'll post again!